« Prácticas de Periferia » – Collaborative Process (Argentina, Ecuador)

Co-directed by María José Trucco, Elina Rodríguez, and Fabian Wagmister, the « Prácticas de Periferia » project opened up a prolific field of reflection on individual and collective ways to produce art, as well as exercising new practices for the exchange of knowledge between artists. With support from COINCIDENCIA, a group composed of ten artists from Argentina, Ecuador, and Switzerland, practiced, between September and December 2019, a set of simultaneous actions in geographically distant spaces, sharing the same rules for their routes.

Setting a starting point, two meeting points, and an arrival point, the artists: Alejandro Cevallos N (Ecuador), Patricio Dalgo Toledo (Ecuador), Patricio Gil Flood (Argentina), Mariuxi Girales (Ecuador), Sarah McLaren (Switzerland), Ángeles Piqué (Argentina), Eliane Rodríguez (Argentina), María José Trucco (Argentina), Alexia Turlin (Switzerland), and Fabian Wagmister (Argentina), proposed a line of observation, action, and registration for the creation of collective cartographies around the periphery.

Using only individually driven means of locomotion – such as walking, cycling, and rowing – artists were able to inhabit metropolitan, suburban, rural landscapes, and transit through villages of a region whose fluvial plots sometimes guided their paths and encounters. In this way, the Matanza-Riachuelo and Salado basins in Argentina, and the Guayas River basin in Ecuador, were covered. Not only were the individual routes shared at the meeting points between the artists, but also in public instances close to the routes.

With the support of the: National Arts Fund (Argentina), Metropolitan Fund for Science, Culture and Arts (Argentina), EXActa Foundation (Argentina), cheLA (Argentina), Édhea (Chile), REMAP UCLA (USA), and, finally, the MAAC Museum of Anthropology and Contemporary Art of Guayaquil (Ecuador), the project developed an integrated set of digital tools for documentation and interpretive expression simultaneously, through a digital platform that updated individual and collective registers in real-time.

« Prácticas de Periferia » was able to bring together artists, curators, theorists, and technologists to create dialogues about notions of the periphery and discuss, with collective reflections as a starting point, socially marginalized spaces as vortexes of legitimate and powerful cultural productions.